Wembley Stadium & the NFL

During a two week design sprint our team (Jem, Amar, Imogen and myself) was challenged with leveraging the existing Wembley App to enhance attendee and user in-stadium experience, particularly during NFL games.

BRIEF

To leverage the current Wembley app to give attendees better discovery of the stadium facilities and to simplify the process of purchasing concessions and merchandise from the counter and their seats.

PROBLEM

Wembley stadium is a huge venue and people are often confused when navigating around the stadium. They struggle to find the information they want when they need it. They also don’t want to spend time queueing for food, merchandise or toilets and possibly miss any game action.

We have observed that the current product isn’t meeting these goals, which is causing fans frustration during their game experience.

HYPOTHESIS

Enhance the existing app with more proactive features to assist users.

Provide information to the user on demand

Help users navigate the stadium to find and use all stadium facilities

Proactively offer ways of avoiding long queues

Incorporate in-seat ordering to prevent users from missing any game action

We believe that adding an in-seat order function with collection or delivery will alleviate the stress of queuing and missing the game.

We’ll know this is true when we see more people using the app and food/merchandise sales increase.

RESEARCH

We undertook initial research on Wembley Stadium, the existing Wembley App and the NFL. We needed to understand who our “client” was as well as knowing how the existing product works, and understanding what environment our users would be using the app.

Further research was then done on NFL Stadiums in the USA and existing NFL Apps. These provided great insight into what can be done and how well the NFL are already doing this.

We also did competitive analysis on other UK Stadiums and other Apps which offer similar services to what we might be able to incorporate, such as food delivery.

User questionnaires and interviews helped us to understand what user’s current experiences with stadium visits are like and why they attend live games. We got to know their moments of enjoyment and their pain points.

Wembley Stadium hosts a lot of events, other than just NFL. The App will potentially be used for more than just NFL. So broadening the research and analysis to incorporate festivals, music events, large venues etc helped to understand other issues users may have.

Research on trends in technology and digital experiences for sporting events was also done to understanding what the future of Stadiums may look like.

THE FLOWS & SKETCHES

A task analysis helped us understand the pain points associated with arriving at the stadium, finding a food stall, ordering and buying food and then navigating to our seat.

Once we understood our key issues and our key features we were able to sketch out our user flows. We divided this up between the team and produced a user flow each. There was a crossover between Food and Merchandise with the checkout process, as well as the delivery and collection options.

The flows showed that the food and merchandise processes were going to be the most difficult areas to introduce so as a team we did a design studio for this process. The design studio gave us a good basis which we then hashed out further on the whiteboard together.

Design Studio and whiteboard sketching

Initial drawn sketch screens were tested with users to get feedback. This also gave us ideas for other features as well as improving the flow as it exists.

PROTOTYPE

Moving to digital screens meant we could stitch them together in InVision and create a clickable prototype for further user testing.

The initial version was low fidelity with no images, but did show layout, buttons and labeling and the feature functionality.

We had great feedback from two very different users: a group of guys who are not technologically advanced and didn’t really use Apps. The other user feedback came from James who is a big sports fan and attends games regularly. He has an iPhone and an Apple Watch so matches our key persona very well. His feedback was great and we amended the checkout process with additional payment options based on his suggestions.

User testing with our prototype

With each digital iteration we further tested and gained further insight into user preference, navigation and understanding of the App. We added on-boarding screens and made the whole process much more proactive rather than reactionary.

OUTCOME

We now have a fully functional clickable prototype which we can further test with users.

The features include:

Order food and drink from seat for collection or delivery

Order merchandise from seat for collection

Find a point of interest in the Stadium, such as food and merchandise stands, program stands, toilets, areas of other entertainment during the game

Find an available nearby toilet based on your seat or current location

High fidelity prototype screens

PROTOTYPE LINK

LOOKING FORWARD

From the user interviews and user testing we received a lot of feedback and ideas of what features could potentially be added to the App. Keeping in mind our key user types and their needs we prioritised this long list of features.

During this process we have focussed on the in-stadium experience for our users. Next version we will help improve the out-of-stadium experience.

Exit queue information — so users can exit the stadium quickly and easily without large queues

API to Google Maps or CityMapper — to assist with getting to and from the stadium easier, as well as in-stadium navigation

Parking information and live updates — to making finding a parking spot easier and to avoid traffic queues when exiting the stadium area